isoglossia

Two weeks ago I wrote about the onset of spring. Almost overnight it has become official. We set our clocks forward last weekend and on our train ride back from Venice we got to see the effect which that one precious extra hour of evening light can make even so soon after the equinox. As we glided east out of the Veneto and toward the isogloss we could look down from the rails’ embankment and into people’s gardens, gardens full of acid-yellow forsythia, magenta azalea, and fruit trees exploding into sudden blossom like frozen pink fireworks. The vines are holding out. They stand everywhere on both sides of this border in stark profiles tethered to trellises which are so orderly in their geometry that they create a strobing effect on the eye as the train whirs past at 120 km/h. I enjoy this trippy visual candy in a way I cannot when I am driving through the same scenery. The same thing happens when we pass by the shady stands of poplars planted in perfect grids, and their blond trunks float and dance and shimmy against the dark shadows in the strobe-light of the setting sun.

The vineyards’ perfect geometry makes me think about how un-Italian it seems to be so meticulous about anything related to the creation of wine, wine we’ve been drinking in rich spring quantities in our own back garden evenings with our visiting family. The vines come straight up out of the earth to shoulder-height where they branch at right-angles, creating perfect crosses, and it’s hard not to think of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who traveled from all over Europe to die fighting under Hindenburg and Cadorna and a young Erwin Rommel over this quiet place 90 springs ago. Orderly ranks of their headstones dot the landscape all around this borderland, but the viney crucifixes are more common by far and they wait, on the very verge of producing buds and shoots and tendrils in their green billions.

If you decide to drive through the night from Stanstead to Edinburgh, don’t go with someone who can’t drive a standard. And never ever shuts up even for one second.

If anyone is looking into pitching a new reality show, my idea is a series of absurd challenges for first-time parents with a tiny baby. The first challenge (and by ‘first’ I mean after mastering the concepts of feeding, changing, bathing, and generally dealing with a baby, all of which would constitute an entire absurd reality show alone) should be to take the baby on a crowded train ride into the most thronging, touristed, and inconvenient city in the world on a holiday weekend: that would be Venice, and that would be exactly what we did on Easter Monday. Iwona and Lech, who work as restorers of art, had always wanted to see Venice, and being so close it seemed silly to let a little thing like a baby get in the way of taking a quick day-trip. We did debate about one of us staying home with the boy, but the weather was beautiful and it seemed like a good opportunity to begin living more or less normally in spite of the little dictator.

So it was a day of many firsts for Adam: first train ride, first meal on a train, first boat ride, first meal on a boat, etc. He snoozed serenely through most of it all, surprisingly (and fortunately) through the most hectic stages, for example when the train got too crowded to breathe, and pretty much every step we took through the packed, milling, uneven, stepped-bridged and rubbish-strewn-yet-still-amazing streets of Venice. Speaking city-wise, this is the last place you want to try pushing a voziček.

But the public transport situation was a lot less nightmarish than anticipated. Here’s Adam lunching his way past the Ca’ d’Oro stop on the No. 1 vaporetto:

When we got to the Piazza San Marco stop we were overwhelmed by the crowds. It shouldn’t have come as any surprise. It seems to me that no matter when you go nowadays, Venice is going to be a zoo so you may as well just try to deal with it. In this case dealing with it entailed using the Dortmunders as linebackers, bodyguards, and stevedores to help us move the voziček through the city’s squares and alleys and over the fondimenti and bridges at a glacial pace. Below is the obligatory touristy photo in front of the Doge’s Palace. Unfortunately none of these photographs, not even the panorama at the top, do justice to the claustrophobic CRUSH of people. I think this was intensified for me by the stress of keeping Adam from being carried away by the tide of gapers in his robust voziček or tipped into a canal from a crowded bridge as we carried him over sedan-chair style.

Just before escaping tourist ground zero

I wanted to find the church of Sta. Maria Formosa because of what my mother’s Edwardian guidebook had to say about it. In addition to being set in a peaceful and pleasant campo (where they apparently used to hold bullfights), its campanile was supposed to have an interesting sculpture on it. My interest in art and architecture isn’t what it once was, but I was taken by this quote from Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice:

“A head, — huge, inhuman, and monstrous, leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be beheld for more than an instant.”

So of course we had to go find it so we could do the obvious:

“Monstrous, leering in bestial degradation”

Each time I go to Venice I like it a little better. It still smells more like a sewer than you might wish and the crowds get more and more intense as the watery end draws nearer, but it is a damn compelling place that everyone ought to see once, if only to experience what the 1,500-year culmination of a sketchy idea for a city looks like. It’s always nice, too, to go with someone who hasn’t been there before, and to get vicariously some of the shock the place can instill. And I think that, no matter how many pictures, documentaries, travelogues you’ve seen, it’s a little like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon: nothing can really prepare you for what it’s like to actually be there. Adam slept through almost his entire first visit to

La Serenissima, which I can’t really blame him for. He may regret this when Venice finally dips beneath the waves (yes, it’s still sinking), but then again I doubt that he’d remember much about the trip even if he’d been wide awake. And with luck and the complicated tidal-management system under discussion it may last long enough for him to take his son there one day. Maybe. And he did wake up fully just in time for the train ride home, which he did not seem to love. His commentary on the shortcomings of the Italian rail system no doubt delighted all in 2nd class.

A wet walk is better than no walk at all.

Driving back toward the isogloss:

So, do you think MI6 or whatever took out Diana and Dodi?
Oh, yeah.
Then why haven’t they taken out Camilla?
WAIT.

Now, at first glance this inoccuous-looking postcard would probably make you think that I plan to write a post about a nice little jaunt up to the Isle of Wight.

I have never visited the Isle of Wight. No one has ever thought to send me a postcard from the Isle of Wight. Nevertheless, this image comes directly from my archives and I am wondering what I was ever thinking to begin the Random picture stream series with that picture of L’Esprit Nouveau when I had this in the vault. The story behind this postcard is larded with randomness. I suppose that must have been what I was thinking: don’t begin with the MOST random picture — that wouldn’t be random. So I’m smarter than I thought, only I don’t let myself know what I’m thinking til later. That’s smart.

Since I posted the story of buckwheat my sister has written to inform me that a lexical item like the buckwheat I described is known linguistically as a flapping owl. This is something I love about my family: even if you are supposed to be the family expert on some topic, they can always teach you something. So, this flapping owl idea is interesting — private language generated by and shared among families or friends.

My friend Emily in San Francisco is enduring evidence of how the internet works at its best. We met like penpals used to only now they use computers and five years later I still count her among my ‘closest’ friends even though she lives 10 time zones away and we’ve only occupied the same continent at the same moment a handful of times. She did a fair amount of trans-hemispherical hand-holding when I was agonizing about whether to stay in Argentina or not, and was a strong and knowledgeable supporter of the Slovenia plan from its inception. When I got the job offer she told me that she would definitely visit me if I ended up in Slovenia, and sure enough she did.

But for complicated logistical, linguistic, and hedonistic reasons we decided to see Slovenia last during her visit to Europe in the summer of 2002. I picked her up at the airport in Milan (which was surreal, having never met her before and having only one pixelly photograph of her wearing Audrey Hepburn’s sunglasses at a birthday party in a SF biergarten to go on). We drove across northern Italy and the southern coast of France to Barcelona. Our plan was to go to the Paellapallooza or whatever they call it at Benicassim that year, with Radiohead and Belle & Sebastian and who knows who, but we had too much fun and blew off the festival for some reason. I think we were too cool. Or too geeky. Hard to tell.

But that’s getting ahead of the story of the Isle of Wight and so I need to back up to I guess day three of our trip, when we were really settling into the idea of knowing each other as that person across the parking brake rather than some disembodied email wit. We spent a night in Nice and strolled along the Place de l’Anglais or whatever, the waterfront, in hot sun looking for postcards. It turned out, I think it’s fair to say, that Emily shares my mania for sending postcards to essentially everyone you’ve ever known any time you go somewhere that would potentially engender envy in another human if depicted on a postcard.

The postcards of Nice and many other places fall into three categories. If depicted on a pie-chart (sorry, too lazy to whip up a quick pie-chart, use your imagination), they would occupy two massive swaths approximately equal in size, with one tiny, teeny, eye-poking splinter representing the third category.

Category one is the standard, garden-variety picture-postcard, with various gorgeous views depicting the French Riviera: Nice itself, Juan-les-Pins, Cannes, Monte Carlo/Monaco, and so on. Palms swaying, sumptuous hotels, sunsets melting into the Med. I probably sent one of these to you. (It might’ve gotten lost in the mail).

Category two also saw me purchasing some, but for a more restricted class of recipients. These are the “Spring Break” type of postcard which are basically generic and usually have nothing to do with the place where they are purchased other than to suggest “dude, I am getting LAID! (or would like to)” These are the topless bathers, the thongs, the rows and rows of sand-dusted bottoms, etc, and usually have some sort of bon mot that might or might not have some loose tie with the area the postcard is supposed to represent (”things are NICE in NICE” might be the legend in bubble-gum pink Comic Sans beneath a bunch of hooters, e.g.)

The splinter category, that tiny slice of the pie-chart, is for me the most elusive yet most desirable type of postcard. These are the postcards that were delivered by mistake or through some less-obvious means came to be where they should not. A close relative is the postcard that is so random and inscrutable that no one has bought it, so it sits there in the sun-drenched rack year after year, curling and fading and accruing more camp flavor with each passing decade.

This is how we got the Isle of Wight postcards. For a second as we stood there on the sidewalk of the sea-side promenade in Nice the world seemed to wobble slightly on its axis while we asked ourselves, “did we somehow arrive upon the Isle of Wight without meaning to? What the…?” But quickly we regained our wits, accepted where we were, and bought up all of the Isle of Wight postcards (maybe eight of them). We saved them to send to the people who would be most entertained to get a postcard from somewhere we weren’t. Or to cherish forever as a monument to chaos.

Maybe it is worth noting at this point that the previous year I had sent Emily a postcard from Tasmania — that is, the postcard came from Tasmania and I came across it while I was in Argentina. I think it’s safe to say that I have never been within 5,000 miles of Tasmania.

It seemed so random that those postcards had been there in that rack that we decided that Isle of Wight would for the rest of the trip be our phrase for dealing with the bizarre and the unexpected. It seemed to work pretty well. Plenty of Isle of Wight things can happen between Barcelona and Ljubljana. I am not sure whether Emily has kept this in her lexicon. I get precious few occasions to use it, but I treasure the memory, and am releasing it into the wild.